O Kanye! My Kanye!

America’s got a new poet laureate: an angry white man from the poetic city of Detroit.
Philip Levine spent most of his life working various industrial jobs (such as the night shift at the Chevrolet Gear and Axle factory) throughout the Detroit area. He spent his off-hours reading and writing poetry.

Sound familiar? It’s a near-identical story to that of Marshall Mathers, or as he’s better known today, Eminem. Marshall, an angry white man from Detroit, studied rap in his off-hours until he began to break into the industry.

It was this observation that reinforced a point I have considered for years: why isn’t rap held in the same esteem as poetry? When you boil it down, rap is the common man’s poetry.

This is the reason Levine has achieved such fame — he writes the everyday woes of factory life in Detroit. He crafts beautiful words for the common man’s battle through daily life. Isn’t this the same thing that ’Ye, Jay and Dre do?

Rap tells us the plight of the common man in today’s society through well-crafted verse and has recently developed into more of an art than we recognize. A recent, high-selling example is Kanye West and Jay-Z’s collaboration album, “Watch the Throne.” Throughout all of the tracks we see pain and suffering that many must endure exposed through metaphor, allegory, hyperbole, rhyme (of course) and more.

The duo spit rhymes about fatherhood, the idea of power in today’s society, brotherhood and the role of organized religion in our world. What does the common man worry about? Representatives in Congress making laws that hinder the people, being the best man he can for his children, how he can aid his friends without hurting himself and who exactly he should pray to. I would venture to say that Yeezy and Jay rival Levine.While rap achieves the same goal many poets strive for, it achieves it in the same traditional means, as well.

In “No Church in the Wild,” Jay-Z has a knack for imagery and symbolism, heard in his first verse: “Tears on the mausoleum floor/ Blood stains the coliseum doors/ Lies on the lips of a priest/ Thanksgiving disguised as a feast.” In multiple tracks, the two make allusions to the slaying of Julius Caesar through figures like Brutus and Cassius Longinus. These are the same poetic devices “real” poets use to make successful works.

The track “Made in America” conveys the long process it took for minorities to gain success in America due to the efforts of “Sweet Brother Malcolm,” “Sweet King Martin,” etc., while juxtaposing the lives of many minorities. This is bigger than how many see it. This is poetic.I believe so much in what rappers have to say, and how they say it, that I think poetry classes should be devoted to it.

Current and future educators, you’re sitting on an untapped gold mine of verse. Think of the interest in the students. Think about the connection to today’s culture.Rap is more than cheap pop culture. It’s true that a lot of rap about the “bitches in da clubs” is churned out quickly in an effort to get it mainstreamed and reap the benefits, but that doesn’t mean we have to stigmatize the whole genre.

We don’t look at Sylvia Plath’s works and say that all poetry is depressing verse stemming from daddy issues, so why do so many do that with rap?

­— sjostrow@indiana.edu